The driver smiled in agreement and stopped the truck to enable the swapping of their positions.
Jake pulled away, glancing in the rear mirror to see the next vehicle in the convoy loom a little larger. The convoy had been travelling for three weeks this time and because they had pushed their vehicles, wagons and horses harder than usual, they had covered a greater distance. The men, women and children of the convoy were accustomed to the harsh and strenuous existence of travelling. Since the Event had taken place nineteen years ago, sporadic bands of nomadic groups wandered the countries of the Earth in search of hope and a new beginning.
The organization and welfare of these groups depended upon the country itself and the condition of its infrastructure, government, both national and local, and the degree of creature infestation still prevalent. This convoy numbered around three hundred and fifty members, with an assortment of horse-drawn and motorized transport. It was heavily armed and counted a contingent of ex-military personnel amongst its numbers. The leader, by mutual consent, was Jake, a young man of twenty-two, who had only been five years of age when the Event took place.
This itinerant way of life had been all the man had known, and a world devastated by the creature infestation had been all he had experienced. Although he was some thirty years younger than the eldest male members of the convoy, Jake’s leadership had never been questioned. His integrity and bravery and his ability to adapt and drive the group forward was greatly valued by the other members of the convoy. But privately he grew weary of the responsibility. His wife, Angelina, had given birth to twin boys recently, and in these barbaric times and hostile lands, he felt the urge to stay by his family’s side overwhelming the need to lead the convoy.
The pilgrimage they had undertaken had brought the convoy hundreds of miles from the French port of Calais to the foot of the Alps. Reports had long filtered through Europe of an established stronghold in the mountain range where civilization had re-established itself into an organized, ordered and structured society. Now, as Jake steered the truck around another corner on the long, rock strewn, dirty road that seemed to have stretched from his birth to this point, he noticed his rifle lying on the floor of the cab. He slowed the truck fractionally and retrieved it, checking it was loaded with one hand whilst keeping the truck’s course level with the other. When his eyes fell back on the road, there was a collection of clothes loosely resembling a human being standing in front of the truck.
Jake swung the wheel violently one way, then the other to compensate, feeling the suspended moment of inertia in the pit of his stomach, as the truck tried to determine whether it should jack-knife or remain upright. The battle with gravity and momentum won, Jake applied the brakes gradually as the rear of the truck swung around to become the front and he leaped from his seat and into the rear of the vehicle.
‘Is everyone okay?’ he implored, stumbling towards the infant twins.
But Angelica had beaten him to the children and found them still sound asleep, and dazed but unhurt she replied in panic, ‘What happened, creatures?’
‘No,’ replied Jake, and threw another glance around the inside of the truck before returning to the cab, his rifle still in hand.
Swiftly he opened the cab door and dropped onto the dusty, cracked road, signaling over his shoulders for two members of the convoy to follow him, and then gesturing for one to assume a position to one side of the road. This having been done, he approached the figure. He knew it was not a creature. The intelligent elements of the infestation operated on their terms, waiting for individuals to stumble into their traps, and the baser, instinct-driven examples would simply rush a convoy in groups of five or six, heedless of the consequences. This was undoubtedly a stray human, possibly injured, probably suffering from the results of torture or dismemberment at the hands of the creatures.
Jake approached the disheveled bundle of rags standing on the pitted, broken surface of the road and he spoke apprehensively, ‘Are you alone? Are you injured, can you hear me, can you speak?’
The figure raised its arms to its head and four rifles were cocked and trained on its torso, but it simply pulled back the coverings that its head was swathed in. Jake noticed the hair first, as dark as his own, but streaked with grey. And the eyes, intensely brown like his, but haunted with sorrow beyond the woman’s thirty-something years. The woman looked around, as if she had arrived at that spot seconds before Jake’s truck, having been asleep on a different planet.
Jake took two more steps closer to the woman and spoke again, ‘My name is Jake, this is our convoy, we are travelling through France, who are you? Where do you come from? Do you understand me?’
The woman looked at him and tilted her head like an attentive dog, but did not speak, and time passed, carried by the dry wind, biting and sour tasting. Just as Jake was about to speak again, the woman opened her mouth and attempted to reply, but all that fell from her lips was silence. Then, she tried again, making a hard, brittle sound like dead leaves.
The third time she gasped, ‘I don’t remember. I was here, but I don’t remember how. I think I was left here, but I don’t know why, who by, I can’t recall anything.’
Jake came nearer, but as he did so his comrade by the roadside alerted him and instinctively he dropped to one knee and raised his gun. Beyond the woman two creatures raced towards the group, their springing, loping gait eating up the ground as their fearful shriek pierced the air. They wore no coverings and their wet, slimy skin was stretched paper-thin over their skeletal frame, and its transparency made the movement of tissue and muscle visible. The effect was of two re-animated cadavers fleeing from the grave, manic, murderous and screaming with a mixture of pain and pleasure.
The two creatures were of similar build, long and lean but with distinctly different heads. One of the things had a head roughly the size and shape of a wild boar, two blunted tusks bursting through cracked, burnt skin, and what remained of its human features were shunted to one side of its face, as if a landslide had dislodged and relocated them. The other creature appeared as a series of bony stems that grew from its shoulders, each growth containing a separate portion of its face, with the viscous-looking mouth housed on the foremost protuberance.
Jake and his comrade by the side of the road fired simultaneously. Unknowingly they had both trained their weapons on the same target and the thing with the branched head took two shells through its chest. The two men knew such a wound would not kill it, but because of its resemblance to human physicality, it would still be floored and rendered immobile, until it could be finished off later. But the boar-headed creature continued to rush at them, on a direct course for the woman, and there was no time available to fell it without possibly hitting her.
But as the seconds expanded to allow for any number of possible courses of action by the two men, the woman spun round to face the creature, and as she did so she thrust her hand out, palm outwards to intercept it. The force of the blow was extraordinary; the woman’s hand collapsed into the thing’s chest and emerged from the mid region of its back.
The woman swiftly retracted her arm from the cavity and the creature fell to the floor, great gushes of thick bile-like, oily blood pumping into the air as she stood over it. Her arm was smeared with filthy tissue and her hand was clasped around something that jumped and quivered. The woman turned her hand over and opened it to reveal the still beating heart of the creature, then she slipped to the road unconscious, as she remained for the next ten days.
As the convoy continued on its journey, Angelica tended to the woman and the woman dreamed. She dreamed of her son, of death and of war, of a giant man dressed in black, not human but humane, of a gateway and of falling. She fell for days and when she hit the ground, on a hard, dusty road, she awoke.
Angelica waited until the woman had drunk water sparingly and eaten a little bread and cheese before she spoke. ‘Do you remember anything? Can you remember how you got here, are you from this area?’
Th
e woman shook her head and Angelica carried on gently, offering more water. ‘Jake says you killed one of the creatures on the road back there, he said you…’ and she hesitated, looking for the words and found, ‘he said you just tore it apart!’
The woman stopped drinking and said, ‘Jake?’
‘Yes, my husband, Jake, and my name is Angelica. Jake leads the convoy. We have two children, Daniel and Frank, would you like to see them? Do you, did you have children yourself?’
‘Yes,’ stuttered the woman. ‘I think. A little boy, I lost him though.’
And Angelica touched the woman’s shoulder. ‘Do you remember anything?’
The woman smiled slightly and said, ‘My name is Alexandra.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Alex,’ the woman repeated, ‘My name is, was, Alex and my son was called… Jake, like your husband.’
Angelica returned the smile and replied, ‘What happened to your husband, Alex, was it the creatures?’
‘My husband, I don’t remember. It’s all so muddled. What creatures?’
Angelica looked surprised. ‘The creatures, from the Event. The ones that appeared from nowhere nineteen years ago. Like the one you killed on the road when we found you.’
‘Show me your children, Angelica,’ and Angelica helped Alex to her feet and across the small compound where the convoy had established a temporary camp.
The twins were awake and pawing at the mobile hung over their cot, four hands and four feet attempting to engage the suspended planes and trains.
‘Their eyes!’ said Alex.
‘Yes?’ said Angelica, confused.
‘Each child has one brown and one blue eye. I’ve never seen that before.’
Angelica smiled and lifted a stray lock of unruly auburn hair away from Alex’s face. ‘All children have been born like that since the Event, you must know that, Alex?’
‘I… I can’t remember… tell me, Angelica, tell me everything.’
So Angelica told Alex everything. She told her of the Event on a Sunday morning in October 2036. Of the gateways that had opened on a global scale for just under seventeen minutes on that morning, allowing the infestation of over six million of the creatures. And of how those creatures attacked mankind and his world, overwhelming him and devastating Earth’s population.
What ensued was tantamount to a planetary catastrophe, with a breakdown of seventy-five percent of the global economic and social infrastructures. Hospitals closed, power grids failed, law enforcement ceased, nuclear facilities were destroyed, planes fell from the sky and transport ended, as an estimated two hundred and fifty million people perished in the first seventy-two hours. No one really knew where the creatures came from, but many believed Hell had overflowed and that the dead had been given access to the living, and now preyed upon them. And for nineteen years man had existed as a fragmented race, slowly rebuilding his empire from the ruins and fighting back.
When the camp had posted its border patrols and bedded down for the night, Alex sat alone by one of the fires and watched the stars. Her memory was returning and although she did not know what her place now was in this world, the man in black had been true to his word and Alex had been given a second chance. She knew, or felt she knew, her husband was dead, probably as a result of injuries sustained in the room where she had seen him through the portal. But he had not let Jake die a second time and it saddened her now to think of her husband suffering.
As she dwelt on her husband’s memory she felt she could hear him calling her name over and over and she turned to respond. But Robert, yes, Robert, that was his name, was not there. Only the mountains, faintly lit by a sky full of stars. But somewhere, possibly amongst those stars, Robert looked over her and Jake and the two children. And she would hold her son again, after passing with him through the veil of death and falling back to the Earth to find him.
The sound of footsteps turned her head and the young man called Jake stood in front of her.
His eyes were full of tears and his chest rose and fell as his voice struggled to form into words, then he spoke softly, holding out one hand. ‘Mother, I knew you would find a way back, I’ve been waiting for you.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Robert picked up the phone again and waited for a connection and when it came, he whispered one word over and over again, sure in the knowledge she would hear him, ‘Alex.’
It was not a phone in the real sense of the word and he was not a man in the real sense of that word either. It was the illusion of a phone, forged from an ethereal material that did not exist in the three-dimensional world, but occupied a domain greater and more expansive in every context. It was the illusion of a phone sat in the illusion of a small house on a beach.
But no answer came, although this time Robert was sure there had been something, a fleeting moment of frequencies coming together, then it was gone. He replaced the phone on its receiver and stood thinking. Of course there were no CCI implants left on Earth, all having been removed after the Event, either surgically in the remaining medical facilities or brutally and crudely by desperate individuals.
The man held one hand up in front of his face and studied it. Then he left the small house and rejoined the group on the beach, watching a small rowing boat drifting on the calm water.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Stephen Andrews pushed the small rowing boat into the water from where it rested on the edge of the great lake. The little craft floated away from his hands for a moment, then slowed and bobbed in the water as he followed. Climbing inside, Andrews stood and stretched the remnants of a good night’s sleep out of his arms and torso. Another beautiful day and another perfect day. Andrews did not understand why it should be so, but that did not concern him too much.
He was quite content to accept there was a plan, a scheme to all of this. And if he did not understand it at this juncture, he could set that incomprehension aside for the time being and appreciate the way things now were. He was certain he was affecting everything around him in some unconscious way. He had not brought this world he populated into existence though. The landscape was a stage of some sort and he was dressing it, but he did not know how he was accomplishing the task. It was as if his mind was tuned into the fabric of this place.
Subtle changes in his mood seemed to reflect moments later in the world around him, manifesting in alterations in weather, climate and even scenery. But there did seem to be limitations to his powers and always there was the sense of unreality, as if he were living in a perpetual dream state.
He could not fly, although he had tried. He assumed the limitations his physical existence put upon his abilities in life still existed here. Maybe exposure to forces such as gravity, reasoning and culture created so many restraints on the mind that it was only with a supreme effort that it could now unburden itself. If time still existed as a linear concept that would be all that was needed, to discard the shackles that still restricted Andrews’ mind. Then, when his mind was truly free, was it beyond the realms of possibility that new layers would be revealed to him? And as his old self disintegrated, maybe he would be allowed to join his wife and child again.
The boat moved across the lake, which seemed to extend in front of Andrews forever. The water was clear and deep and was hidden by velvet green hills that tumbled wild, spectacular and impossible flowers down to the very edge of the water. And the hills themselves were brushed with yellow and gold sunlight from a powder blue, faultless sky. The fishing would be good today and the weather would be fine, with maybe some light rain in the afternoon, he hadn’t decided yet.
A small pain jabbed in his chest. It was the regret at leaving Robert alone in the asylum. Lately he had noticed that sorrow, regret, remorse, guilt and shame and countless other negative emotions were finding physical expression in his body. Now as the boat drifted out further, Andrews tentatively touched where the pain had been located in his chest. The discomfort from the sharp stab was subsiding already, but it echoed
in his mind as a flood of thoughts and ideas. Andrews was coming to realize that facing these unresolved issues and dealing with them, or at least understanding them fully, might hold the key to the growing process he felt he was subject to.
He looked towards the shore he had launched from. It was distant now and he could just discern a group of five or six figures standing by the edge of the lake. They had not been there when he pushed away from the shore, they never were. Andrews was accustomed now to them appearing when his little boat had travelled this far. On the first few occasions he had turned the boat around and frantically rowed back towards the group. But each time they turned, climbed one of the surrounding hills and, inconceivably, he had never followed.
When he had “arrived” Andrews had spent a long time lying on the shore looking at the clouds. Time did not seem to follow any standardized model in this place and Andrews’ own biological clock seemed to have been turned off. Each moment appeared to either expand into days or implode into a micro-second. When Andrews had eventually tried to make sense of everything, he could only conjure up a montage of blurred images in his mind, like watching events on a screen that was out of focus and played at the wrong speed.
But there seemed to be some kind of buffer in operation that was not allowing him to grasp the true reality of the situation and he was fine with that.
Something was whispering in his ear and the voice was uncannily similar to his wife’s, ‘All in good time, Stephen.’
It seemed that shortly after that the house had materialized on the shore. He had been thinking about shelter and then the simple, two-story wooden cabin had appeared, although the weather seemed to be constant and unchanging. Andrews was beginning to understand the workings of the formula. His cognitive abilities seemed wholly intact still and the fundamental requisites that his reason identified were being fulfilled.
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